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Steel Wool Studios
Steel Wool Studios (previously named Steel Wool Games) is an independant virtual reality game developer team. The company was founded in Oakland, California in 2013. They worked with Scott Cawthon on one of the latest installment in the Five Nights at Freddy's series, Five Nights at Freddy's VR: Help Wanted. __TOC__ Description History The founder of Steel Wool, Josh Qualtieri, who is a fan of NASA, wanted desperately to be involved in ongoing missions to explore the surface of Mars. He studied a degree in astrophysics for it, but the Martian exploration projects at NASA was then defunded. Without any other choice, he started working at Pixar who needed smart mathematicians who could deal with complex computer algorithms. After helping to create several animated films, Josh and Pixar's technical director Andrew Dayton decided to try making a game. They created the team with three Pixar artists: Sequoia Blankenship, Jonathan Hoffman and Jason Topolski. They named themselve Steel Wool Games, and developed a cute mobile title called Flyhunter Origins. As a studio founded by Pixar creatives, they instantly drew attention from the gaming industry. The co-creator of Guitar Hero, Charles Huang discovered their newly formed studio early on and decided to help them. Charles got a special invite to Valve for them, where they were given a behind-the-scene look at the company's work on the HTC Vive. They were blown away by the high level of immersion, and immediately pivoted out of the mobile games market, to instead focus on virtual reality. They changed their name to Steel Wool Studios, and successfully convinced HTC to provide them with funding and resources to create an original project for their new device by giving them an early demo for a VR game which later became Quar. Josh who is a Martian lover created a realistic computer model for the Curiosity rover and put it into the VR world. Fascinated by how amazing it looks in VR, Steel Wool started making a VR game about exploring Mars, Mars Odyssey, to fulfill Josh's childhood dream. Scott Cawthon later discovered Steel Wool's works, and he was very impressed. Eventually, Scott hired the studio to create a full virtual reality remake of the original Five Nights at Freddy's game. Not long into development, though, they began to realize the problems with creating a direct translation of this relatively simple game, as VR was too immersive for Scott's original artwork and character models, and the flaws in designs and costumes could be easily spotted with greater visual fidelity. However, with the animation skill of the team, they began to redesign a lot of art assets Scott had provided, adding additional hydraulics and machine parts. Members :NOTE: The following roles for the members are according to the credit list in Help Wanted. Leaders * Andrew Dayton - Executive Producer. * Jason "Jtop" Topolski - Executive Producer / Creative Director. * Stewart Johnson - Lead Engineer. Other Members * Evan Lampi - Game Design / Animation Supervisor. * Phillip M. Shaw - Game Design / Technical Director. * Saul Aguilar - Game Design / Technical Artist. * Nathan Spandorf - Technical Artist / Modeling / Lighting. * Rodney Brett - Rigging / Character Modeler. * Chloe Costa - Junior Rigging. * Jennifer Bach - UI Artist / 2D Artist. * Alex Nelson - Concept / UI Artist / 2D Artist. * David Weinman - Modeling / Shading / Lighting. * Tom Myers - Animation. * Lakshminarayanan Vijayaraghavan - Engineering. * Brett Thompson - Junior Engineering, Projects/Game Developed Reception External Links * Steel Wool's website * Steel Wool's Facebook account * Steel Wool's Twitter account * Steel Wool's YouTube account * Steel Wool's Instagram account * Steel Wool's Linkedin account Category:Developers Category:People